As a LibriVox reader, you can tap into your acting talents and give your characters voices. Depending on your book and the character, you may choose to be subtle or outrageous. No matter which, it makes it easier for the listener to distinguish during dialogue.
How do you create a character’s voice? Tone (nasal, smooth, scratchy, breathy, rumbling), pitch (high, low) and speed combine to make memorable voices.
Experiment, practice, and listen closely to friends and strangers to hear a wide range of voices you can imitate.
See, this is why I’m glad to be doing monologue ala Dostoyevsky next. I just can’t do voices, as my last reading clearly indicates.
Voices are challenging, but they are kinda fun, too.
I have ended up re-recording a lot of the dialogue bits in my readings to make them more consistent. Sometimes I print out the chapter, highlight the characters in different colors and record their speeches non-sequentially (all of Mr. A’s dialogue from the story, then all of Ms. B, for example). Then I edit the speeches into place within the main narration. This makes the accents/tones more consistent. A little bit, anyway. I’m not very good at it.
I had a couple of voices. I had to make those different, because from the dialogue itself wasn’t always clear who said what. But I figured that I am reading this, not acting it, so I tried to keep any distinction to a minimum.
In two of three cases I used a high vs. low pitch, and in one I made the bad guy talk slower, as if he was taunting the other guy. (Which he was.)